“The two best gifts in life are love and an approving conscience.”
-Cecily Hamilton
Cecily Hammill (1872-1952) is better known by her stage name Cecily Hamilton. An actress, playwright, novelist, and journalist, she wrote over eight plays, several novels, a series of travelogues and was a journalist for the feminist journal Time and Tide and for Time Magazine.
In 1908, she founded the British Women Writers’ Suffrage League whose four-hundred members produced much of the propaganda materials for the battle for the vote. Her plays How the Vote Was Won and the Pageant of Women were performed all over the country. She also wrote the influential critique of marriage, Marriage as Trade.
A pacifist who worked as a nurse and by entertaining the troops, she was deeply affected by World War I, writing in 1922 an early science fiction novel Theodore Savage in which British civilization is destroyed by war.
Cecily Hamilton’s debut 1919 novel, William, An Englishman, features a young Englishman who comes into some money and his suffragette wife. They are vacationing in Belgium when, unknown to them, WWI breaks out.
The following excerpt is from the beginning of the novel where William is much taken by the bravery of his fiancée, Griselda, who has stood up to protest.
” Mr. Chairman, I rise to protest against the speaker’s gross insult to the noble women who–” A man in the seat behind clapped his hands on her shoulders and rammed her back into her chair where she writhed vigorously, calling him coward and demanding how he dared ! His grip, sufficiently hard to be unpleasant, roused her fighting instincts and gave a fillip to her conscientious protest; in contact with actual, if not painful, personal violence, she found it easier to scream, hit out and struggle. Two stewards, starting from either end of the row of chairs, were wedging themselves towards her ; she clung to her seat with fingers and toes, and shrieked a regulation formula which the meeting drowned in opprobrium. Conscious of rectitude, the jeers and hoots but encouraged her and fired her blood; and when her hands were wrenched from their hold on the chair she clung and clawed to the shoulder of her next-door neighbour, a stout and orthodox Liberal, who thrust her from him, snorting indignation.
One steward had her gripped under the armpits, the other with difficulty mastered her active ankles; and, wriggling like a blue silk eel and crowing her indefatigable protest, she was bundled in rapid and business-like fashion to a side entrance of the building.
” Cowards ! ” she ejaculated as she found her feet on the pavement. “Damned little cat!” was the ungentlemanly rejoinder. ” If you come here again I’ll pare your nasty little nails for you.” And, dabbing a scored left hand with his handkerchief, the steward returned to his duties leaving Griselda in the centre of a jocular crowd attracted to the spot by several previous ejections.
She was minus her rosebuds, her toque and quite half of her hairpins ; on the other hand, she held tightly grasped in her fingers a crumpled silk necktie which had once been the property of a stout and orthodox Liberal. She was conscious that she had acted with perfect dignity as well as with unusual courage and that consciousness, combined with her experience of similar situations, enabled her to sustain with calm contempt the attentions of the jocular crowd. (pp. 33-34)
More on Cecily Hamilton
Cecily Hamilton The Persephone Project Review of William, An Englishman
Spotlight on Cicely Hamilton A review of her autobiography An Errant Life
Biography by Liz Whitlaw 1990 The Life and Rebellious Times of Cicely Hamilton
March of Women
Lyrics by Cicely Hamilton
Shout, shout up with your song!
Cry with the wind for the dawn is breaking.
March, march swing you along,
Wide blows our banner and hope is waking,
Sing with its story, dreams with their glory,
Lo! They call and glad is their word!
Forward! Hark how it swells
Thunder and freedom, the voice of the Lord!
source https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Cicely_Hamilton